Fritinancy

May linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker staff writer best known for his deeply researched nonfiction (The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda and 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief). This new book, however, is a novel, although you’ll be forgiven for mistaking it for journalism.

It’s set in a time very much like the present (the US president is “self-conscious about his girth” and keeps a tanning bed in the White House Cosmetology Room—an actual room in the actual White House), in which a viral pandemic spreads from Indonesia to the hajj in Mecca to a submarine under the Atlantic to North America and beyond. Our hero, epidemiologist Henry Parsons, scrambles to decode the virus and prevent its spread while civilization’s institutions crumble on every continent. If the plot is a little overstuffed and the dialogue speech-y, you’re unlikely to care, because the story is so eerily prescient and timely. (Wright began writing the book in 2015 and turned in the manuscript in 2017, long before COVID-19 broke out.) Wright’s journalistic background serves him well: you’ll learn a lot—painlessly—about viral reproduction, cytokine storms, and the workings of submarines. I listened to the audiobook, which is well narrated by Mark Bramhall: it’s the audio equivalent of a page-turner. 

Corona brands: King Arthur flour

Fourth in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around the end of March, a couple of weeks into California’s shelter-in-place directive, I used up the last of my flour on a batch of Marion Cunningham’s raw apple muffins—a recipe I’d first tasted, years earlier, at Cunningham’s house in Walnut Creek, where I’d gone to interview her. (I’ve forgotten what story I was writing, but I’ll never forget the warm muffins and strong coffee she served me. As I was leaving, she gave me her well-worn and annotated copy of The Breakfast Book, which I still use.)

When I ventured out to buy more flour, all of the shelves were bare. I’d had the bad luck to run out of provisions during a pandemic baking boom; flour mills had been caught short. I was late to this realization: In early March, King Arthur Flour—the oldest flour company in America and the country’s fourteenth-oldest manufacturer—had noticed a 600 percent jump in grocery-store sales of their products virtually overnight. “It was as if half of America had decided all at once that they needed to bake. A lot,” writes David H. Freedman in an engrossing story for Medium about the King Arthur company.

Finally found some!

 

The problem wasn’t supply—there was plenty of wheat available—but logistics. Until the pandemic, home baking had been in decline for years; flour mills like King Arthur stayed in business by supplying restaurants and commercial bakeries, which bought in huge quantities and which were now shut down. 

Freedman’s story reveals how King Arthur quickly adapted to meet the new market demands. It’s also full of other interesting tidbits. For one, the company has been employee owned since 1996. For another, employees call the Vermont headquarters “Carbohydrate Camelot.”

But the story doesn’t delve into the history and significance of the company name. So I did my own investigation.

Stay home, save links

Lynne Murphy wrote about the original UK slogan coronavirus slogan—“Stay at home/Protect the NHS/Save lives”—and its replacement (“Stay alert”), which was “mocked relentlessly on UK social media within a day of its announcement.” My own thoughts went immediately to an old joke, which I see is still alive and well.

Via Zazzle

 

Because Lynne’s a linguist, she went deep on some interesting points of grammar. I hadn’t realized, for example, that at-less “Stay home” marks you as a speaker of American English.

It appears some of you idiots can’t follow a simple instruction so here’s THE NEW AND MUCH CLEARER Government COVID Slogan generator pic.twitter.com/t6tXmfp75E

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) May 11, 2020

I’m a fan of this balanced two-part slogan from PassItOn.com: “Stay apart. Pull together.” Their other pandemic-related billboards—“First In. Second to None”; “Nursing a Country Back to Health”—are good, too.

 

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My American friend Diana Howard wrote about her experience of COVID-19 “confinement” in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she has lived for several years. Diana and I met when she was a graphic designer; we worked on a number of projects together. She’s now a full-time artist, and the accompanying illustrations are charming. 

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And speaking of France (h/t Jesse Sheidlower):

BREAKING NEWS: The Académie Française, the French language police, have just announced that while Covid19 *could* be a masculine word because of “le virus” that it’s preferable to be feminine because of “la maladie.” https://t.co/rsYWY97VEJ

— Dr. Jen Schradie (@schradie) May 8, 2020

 

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Erin Griffith interviewed me for a New York Times article about all those Zoom-y business names. And then she … zoomed away with it. It’s hilarious, and just the teensiest bit deranged. (Check out the URL.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about ten of those Zoom names.

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And speaking of me, my latest story for Medium is about my adventures in picking up trash during the pandemic. Medium says it’s a four-minute read, but you can stretch it out to six if you pace yourself.

 

Word of the week: Fomites

When I was a journalist writing about healthcare and medicine I picked up a lot of medical terminology. Last week, though, I encountered a word I’d somehow never learned: fomites.

Even if parents feel comfortable sending their kids back to school as early as July/August (and many do not), my sense is that teachers are freaking out about the idea of spending all day with our adorable fomites. #schoolsreopening

— Rebecca Bird Grigsby (@danceswithkids) May 4, 2020

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines fomites as “inanimate objects that, when contaminated with or exposed to infectious agents, can retain and transfer the disease,” so technically speaking Rebecca’s usage is inaccurate. (When you’re referring to children, vectors or carriers is a better choice.) Still, I thank Rebecca for the opportunity to chase down the history and etymology of this interesting and pertinent word.

Source: Pediaa 

 

Word of the week: Allostatic load

“Allostatic Load Is the Psychological Reason for Our Pandemic Brain Fog” reads the headline on an April 27 story by Emily Baron Cadloff for Vice. The language may seem abstruse, but Cadloff quickly translates it into plain English: “I’m doing so much less than I’m used to, and I’m so tired.” She’s far from alone during this period of isolation and anxiety.

Allostatic load diagram via ResearchGate

April linkfest

This month’s book recommendation is The Plague and I, published by Betty MacDonald in 1948. The book is a lightly fictionalized account of MacDonald’s nine-month stay in a Seattle tuberculosis sanatorium in the late 1930s, when TB was known as “the white plague”; there were no effective vaccines; and treatment entailed rigorous bedrest, hearty meals, and an occasional session of artificial pneumothorax, in which gas was injected into the pleural cavity. Survival was far from certain and recovery times were long: many of MacDonald’s fellow inpatients remained at the sanatorium for years.

 

Sounds grim, right? Here’s the thing: it’s a hoot. MacDonald is sadly overlooked now—she died in 1958—but she was one of the foremost comic writers of her era, and The Plague and I is sharply observed, un-self-pitying, and downright chipper. (One of the chapters is titled “I’m Cold and So Is the Attitude of the Staff.”) I guarantee it will make you feel much more upbeat about our own current predicament.

Corona brands: Steak-umm

Third in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

My previous posts in this series looked at Lysol and Zoom, brands that have filled real-world needs—for sanitizing and for video-meetings, respectively—during the pandemic. This post is about Steak-umm, a brand whose claim to pandemic fame isn’t its product—although that product has its fervent fans—but its soothing, amusing, occasionally bemusing Twitter account.

many brands haven’t meaningfully responded to this crisis due to internal bureaucracies, self-preservation, or overthinking their “image,” so by the time any message gets out it’s just a watered-down ambiguous ad that’s like “in these uncertain times we’re still here ok”

— Steak-umm (@steak_umm) April 22, 2020

 

Word of the week: Draconian

How much are you suffering under your locality’s COVID-19 restrictions? If you’re reading this, I assume you aren’t running a fever or hooked up to a ventilator but are instead working from home or, if you’re fortunate, collecting unemployment. (Or, if you’re not fortunate, not collecting unemployment because you were self-employed or minimally employed.) Your gym/golf course/favorite restaurant has been closed for weeks; graduations, proms, and sports have been canceled; you can shop only for essentials, you’ve learned how to create makeshift face masks; and you’re washing your hands more than you’d ever dreamed possible.

Maybe you’d call this situation inconvenient. Or stressful. Or tough but necessary if we’re going to flatten the curve and save the lives of our fellow citizens.

On the other hand, maybe you self-identify as a member of the hard-core-individualist, expert-scorning, no-patience-with-patience slice of the Don’t-Tread-on-Me American populace. In that case, maybe you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take any more government interference in your God-given liberties, not for any damn virus, nosiree. You’re calling the situation draconian.

Corona brands: Zoom

Second in a series of posts about US brands that are thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are other video-conferencing tools—Webex, GoToMeeting, Blue Jeans, Google Hangouts—but during the COVIC-19 pandemic one brand has so dominated the landscape that “Zoom” has become the generic default for the whole category and the basis for a raft of new portmanteau words. As a March 23, 2020, New York Times headline put it: “We Live in Zoom Now.”

Corona brands: Lysol

The COVID-19 pandemic has been inconvenient for many, devastating for some, and a source of constant worry for most of us. Many businesses are faltering; some have launched GoFundMe campaigns to stay afloat. (Support your local bookstore!)

But for a handful of brands, the coronavirus crisis has brought heightened visibility and surging sales. Over the next week or so, I’m going to tell the stories of some of those brands.